


Capers, Nitwits, and Japes

by Phritzie



Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: I Don't Even Know, Multi, Non-Explicit Sex, Nonsense, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 14:37:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14380716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/pseuds/Phritzie
Summary: Don't start battles you can't finish.





	Capers, Nitwits, and Japes

Cohabitating was in several ways a trial in character. For both of them.  
  
Even though Sliske never fully moved in with her - such as one could define the act, his possessions being too numerous to ever relocate in full.   
  
It was more that whenever the fancy took he invited himself over. Because she failed to persist in shooing him away and on almost every occasion fed him very well, like a cat, he kept coming back. Sometimes she would be there, sometimes she would not.  
  
They even pretended at something greater, once in a while. Something beautifully broken.  
  
Mostly they got on as fire and air. Eating each other up to nothingness and then suffering in the void of their own grievances until indefinite interest drew them back together.  
  
This resulted in a relationship he treasured into senility.  
  
She would be out troweling among her plants, eyes low to her toil, when he'd decide to splash a little water over her. She'd fling a handful of dirt. That might encourage a brief struggle, at which point the cycle renewed itself and he was openly grateful for the remote nature of her home as he gasped wetly unclean urges for an audience of one, hands buried in her shifting hair. " _Felix_. _Deeper_."  
  
Oh, that hair... how he missed it. So thick. Good for inciting angry quips with a single, sharp tug.  
  
Perhaps given the chance he would go back and change the decision to escalate their minor play at warfare.  
  
But her look of frank horror had been so, so rich. Bucket traps had to have been around since the beginning of civilization. How she hadn't seen the string, he made certain to remind her at every available opportunity.

The pine sap, well.  
  
It lived up to its name.  
  
She ended up having to cut most of it off. What remained fell in a tight run of coils rising well above her ears, bouncy and shaven up the sides, but there were still several delightful forelocks that swung with her gaze.  
  
They did not speak for several days.  
  
Well, yes, he did. She might have even listened once or twice.  
  
He walked into the bedroom on one such night, hoping for some kind of retribution greater than her stolid and persistent stonewalling, and what he received instead would have been heartstopping, if he had one:  
  
Felix reclining on the bed, paging through a book. Felix tucking a very short curl behind her ear, wetting a finger to flick through the beigebound novel. Felix very, very nude.  
  
When she noticed him enter she put the book aside, expectant, but when Sliske made to accept her unspoken invitation she stopped him with a hand over the edge of the covers. He breathed out and waited, puzzled. The hand withdrew a small bottle of dark indigo slurry, sticking to the sides with its gentle rotation in her grip.  
  
_Ah_ , he thought. _There we are. What will that do, my dear? Turn me blue? Transmogrify me into a lamb?_  
  
Instead of hurling it at him, however, she simply pulled the cork stopper free.  
  
"That was very mean, what you did. I didn't appreciate it at all," Felix stated plainly.  
  
And tipped the brew over her chest.  
  
It ran in rivers down and around, viscous enough to cling in the dips and rises of muscle and pinched skin at her waist, made a lighter hue of violet by the thinning of separation from its source.  
  
Sliske felt his mouth go a bit productive. "I see." Some of it ran down her thumb, outstretched before her steady gaze, and some of it hit the green of the sheet to spread sticky and black. "Your debut in performance art is captivating, though I fail to understand how I'm meant to interpret it."  
  
Instead of dignifying him with a response, Felix allowed the bottle to drop to the bed. Round but for the slight neck, it fell upended and began to leak meager traces of what she couldn't drizzle herself with.

"It's rather warm in here, isn't it?" Still nothing.  
  
Her blatant disregard, atypical enough to be concerning, was undeniably arresting instead. She must've been furious.  
  
But he didn't leave. He hissed through his teeth when she finally spoke, deeply neutral.  
  
"Clean this fucking mess up, Sliske."  
  
He knew it had to be some kind of plot.  
  
Surely she knew he knew.  
  
That didn't stop him from chasing every last flow and droplet of the oversweet, indigo concoction from her trembling body.  
  
The intimacy they shared afterward was sublime. Sliske felt an overwhelming sense of dread and accomplishment both as they tangled together, spent and loose, thrilled by the prospect that she might've just been extending an olive branch.

 

* * *

  
Felix, of course, was never quite so darling as to refer to maturity or courtesy when soulrendering pain was just as easy to dole out. Not with him, anyway.  
  
That would've made him special if it wasn't so inconvenient a standard to bear.  
  
She leaned around the door jam and smiled sympathetically. "Done yet?"  
  
Sliske braced himself against the forewall with a sharp hand and scored lines into it as he dry heaved again, not even close to finished with the magically-enhanced emetic. He shot her a glare but it was cut short by another violent jerk in his chest.  
  
Her forefinger spun a lock of hair idly. "I would feel bad, but it's going to take me a few months to grow this back," Felix explained patiently, tone gentle, and stepped away with a neat hop as he lunged with a knee to strike at her ankles, still bent over the commode. "And you'll be fine in maybe... three hours? Two?"  
  
" _You will never know peace again_ ," he promised, a dark rattle from his lungs.  
  
"Again he says," she wondered, leaving to go find her bow in case Sliske was seriously contemplating an altercation. "When have I ever."  
  
His revenge was even more insidious than hers had been, and for that Felix had to applaud him.

He was crafty.

A fucking nightmare incarnate, but sharper than she gave him credit for.  
  
It was right after a fairly long voyage around The Skull, too. She was starving for a home cooked meal and a bath with the scent of anything other than unwashed bodies and seabrine when Felix swung through her front door, calling out something bravely amicable.  
  
Those valued creature comforts were not what greeted her return.  
  
"What the hell is this," she whispered, rubbing around the cubic granules that should have been small flecks of oatmeal. Her breakfast bowl was full of salt. So were, as she discovered with dawning irritation, most of the dry goods in her larder.  
  
Chasing suspicion, Felix went to her washroom and tore a bottle from the shelf that should have sloshed; it rattled instead. Even their slicking oil on the bureau had been swapped for the gritty rocks.  
  
She stared at the collection of bottles and sacks on her dining room table in disbelief.

When darkness fused together to take an imposing shape at the opposite side of it, looking all too smug for her taste, Felix gestured wildly between him and the salt.

Sliske only smiled.  
  
"I've heard it's good for the skin."  
  
That was a fight.  
  
He never revealed the location of the stolen goods, either, preferring instead to make her plead until he lowered a shaking hand to her back and forced it into an arch.  
  
"Yes, yes, you're ready now," Sliske rasped, clutching at the place where her shoulderblades kissed. "But do tell me if it starts to hurt."

 

* * *

 

He wanted to stop.

No, he didn't.

Sliske just wanted to know that this wasn't actually driving them apart. Her intense rages every time he successfully got to her, shortly followed by sweet displays of incredibly false forgiveness and his comeuppance, were beginning to feel strained.  
  
But Felix wouldn't stop driving him crazy.  
  
So he couldn't, either.  
  
That was how others were dragged into the crossfire, he imagined; another step in the direction of Too Far.  
  
Leela was little more than a passing notion to him, insufferably polite and dagger-witted. She had a network of intelligence gatherers he could bear a grudging respect for her keen governance of.

She was a useful ally to them.

She loved Felix.

And that was certainly permissible, given that she never, ever make another attempt to bar him from her life. They tolerated one another, not as rivals for the World Guardian's attention, but neighbors in commune with it.  
  
She chuckled, an ugly snort capping the end of her amused refusal. "Uh-uh. I'm not getting involved in that mess."  
  
"You must know something," Sliske wheedled, bordering on petulance that his usual aura of personable coercion worked on her so little. _Lesbians_. "I only need inspiration, petal."  
  
The spymaster offered him a tight uptick at the corner of her mouth and casually leaned an arm supporting a loaded crossbow over her balcony rail, peering down at him in distaste. "The _answer_ is no."  
  
He sighed.

Thought for a moment. Held his hands up in a placating gesture.

"Her birthday is approaching."

Leela's expression faltered before rapidly reforming as annoyance. _Aha_. "So? I knew that," she snipped. "I've known her for way longer than you have--"  
  
"So if you wanted to have the whole day with her, let's say," he rolled his shoulders back and tilted his head toward the sandy street, a practiced display of capitulation that could not have been farther from genuine, "on a lovely island somewhere tropical and very private, maybe the entirety of it to yourselves? And the day after for good measure?"

Her interrupted words dried.

Leela was visibly hooked. But he still held his breath as the crossbow was drawn back, trigger skyward. Her admirably sleek shift lifted in the breeze with her braidloops. _A woman in her grace never frayed._  
  
"Felix is afraid of snakes."  
  
Gilded landing doors slammed shut.  
  
He gleefully absconded to his slipstream of shadows, knowing exactly the garden variety beast, with the most lethal-looking appearance, to utilize in her torment.

Sliske could go about locating a list of suitable getaways for Felix and her paramour after filling the house with them.

 


End file.
